WIRED Awake: 10 must-read articles for 16 February

Your WIRED.co.uk daily briefing. Today, the UK government has opened the consultation phase of a mandatory age check for all online porn, doctors have reported that an increase in paralysis-causing Guillain-Barre syndrome appears to be linked to Zika, Wikipedia's editors have accused the Wikimedia Foundation of secretly developing a search engine to rival Google, and more.

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The British government has launched a public consultation on its plan to implement mandatory age checks for all online pornography (BBC). The consultation document says that mandatory age checks would be required on sites containing anything that would qualify for an 18 or R18 certificate, and that a regulator would be empowered to impose fines or even instruct payment processors to stop working with non-compliant sites. However, security researcher Dr Gilad Rosner has expressed doubts as to whether the majority of free sites and blogs can be effectively controlled by such measures, describing age checks as "a particularly challenging regulatory goal."

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Friday briefing: US government threatens to end intelligence-sharing with allies that buy Huawei

ByWIRED

2. Rise in paralysis condition may be linked to Zika

Doctors have reported growing indications that Zika virus could make its sufferers more susceptible to Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes the immune system to attack skeletal muscular nerves, causing numbness, loss of balance and paralysis (New York Times). The condition is known to strike after other viral infections, such as influenza, HIV and dengue, and the presence of dengue fever antibodies in many affected Zika patients has made it difficult to gather conclusive evidence of a link to Zika. However, neurologist Dr Jairo Lizarazo, treating Zika patients in Columbia, said that "it's an epidemiological association. We don't know exactly how it works. But it's there, for sure."

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The Wikimedia Foundation has been criticised by Wikipedia's community of editors for its lack of transparency about a planned open source search engine, currently in development (Motherboard). Last year, the Foundation received a $250,000 (£173,000) grant to develop what's now called Wikimedia Discovery, designed to be a "system for discovering reliable and trustworthy public information on the internet", according to its grant application. Wikipedia's editor community has accused the Foundation of keeping it in the dark and covertly developing a Google competitor. Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales said the suggestions were "a total lie" and "trolling".

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Coworking spaces with nurseries want to solve the childcare crisis

BySarah Shearman

Researchers analysing the performance of Danish school children aged between eight and 15 have found that their test scores got worse the later in the day that the tests were taken, adding up to a drop of about 1 percent for every hour that passed (Science). Test timing was effectively random, as students were tested depending on when their class times were and when computers were available. The researchers also found that giving students a half-hour break before their test bumped their scores back up by 1.7 percent.

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Scientists from the University of Southhampton have developed high-capacity, high-durability data storage technology which they say opens a new era of eternal data archiving (Phys.org). The technology uses a femtosecond laser to record five dimensional digital data to nanostructured glass, writing files as layers of nanostructured dots just five micrometres apart. The discs have a storage capacity of 360TB, thermal stability of up to 1,000 degrees Celcius and an estimated lifetime of 13.8 billion years. Professor Peter Kazansky said that "this technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation: all we've learnt will not be forgotten."

Researchers from Wake Forest University in the USA have developed a 3D bioprinting tool, able to create synthetic bone, cartilage, and muscle tissue that has proved suitable for implantation into rodent test subjects (PopSci). The printer, called the Integrated Tissue-Organ Printing System, uses a biodegradable polymer which contains living cells to form an outer mould that dissolves once the cellular matter has hardened, leaving behind a lattice that forms the shape of the required tissue and allows oxygen to reach the cells. The researchers created an implanted a variety of human parts into mice and rats. After a number of weeks, the synthetic tissues were found to have integrated healthily. The team says that for human implantation they would want to use the subject's own cells to produce the synthetic tissue in order to reduce the risk of rejection.

Tuesday briefing: Huawei boss says there's 'no way the US can crush us'

Analytics firm Soomla reports that mobile gamers who make an in-app purchase are six times more likely to make another (VentureBeat). The company analysed the behaviour of 20 million players from over 200 countries and found that 65 percent of app revenue comes from 'lifetime' purchases that, for example, add levels or remove adverts and 71 percent from single-use items such as ammo and energy boosts. Predictably, players who cough up cash in one game are more likely to do so in others.

A tiny flower found perfectly preserved in amber in a cave in the Dominican Republic is between 15 and 45 million years old, according to biologists George Poinar and Lena Struwe (Ars Technica). The pair identified the flower as part of the Asterid clade -- a grouping descended from a common ancestor -- which also includes coffee, Strychnine and potatoes. The flower has been named Strychnos electri, but the team isn't sure of whether or not it was poisonous. The date range for the flower is so wide due a lack of well preserved ancient plant fossils to compare it with, but Poinar says that "specimens such as this are what give us insights into the ecology of ecosystems in the distant past. It shows that the Asterids, which later gave humans all types of foods and other products, were already evolving many millions of years ago."

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Move over neon Monzo, now there's a bank card that miaows

ByVictoria Turk

Hasbro's latest Nerf gun, the Rival, fires foam Nerf balls at 68 miles per hour -- over 109 kilometres per hour (The Verge). It's a chunky piece of red or blue plastic that comes with 40 rounds of bouncy foam ammo, all set to be priced at around $70 (£49) when it comes out this autumn. Hasbro says that, even at such high speeds, the Nerf balls won't cause any injuries or leave welts behind when they strike.

The official Predator Facebook page has released the first teaser image for the long-rumoured next instalment in the sci-fi action franchise (io9). Co-written by Shane Black and Fred Dekkar, who between them have been involved in the creation of Iron Man 3, Lethal Weapon and the first Predator film, the teaser image doesn't introduce any radical design changes, but seems to imply that the new movie may be called The Predator.

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This massive lantern is actually a power plant in Finland

ByGian Volpicelli

One in four people experience mental health problems, but according to a new report from an NHS England taskforce, 75 percent of people receive no help. Just £9.2 billion a year is spent on mental health services -- less than a tenth of the overall NHS budget. Campaigners say the situation is deteriorating; mental health trusts saw a real-terms fall in budgets of more than 8 percent between 2010 and 2015, the BBC reported last year, with a group of professionals describing the cuts as "profoundly disturbing".

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